Somerton Man...

The reach of history and connexions around the Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam is wide-ranging and diverse. In this instalment, I’d like to present an interesting event which seems a world away from the poem and its issues but which has a very strong link to the text: the Strange Case of Somerton Man.

This bizarre incident took place in Somerton a suburb of Adelaide in South Australia in November, 1948. A man was found dead on the beach there, fully dressed, having expired whilst apparently taking in the scenery. Passersby had noticed him earlier in the evening and had thought nothing of it, or had thought that maybe he was drunk; when it was observed that he’d lain in situ throughout the night and hadn’t apparently moved, examination determined him to be deceased. So much, so normal.

X Marks the spot where Somerton Man was found

Somerton Man (as he later became known) was in his early middle age. He was well-built, as if used to labouring or some other form of manual occupation, and he seemed to have been in good health. A striking feature was that he was extremely clean – freshly shaved, hair newly cut and with signs of having bathed shortly before his demise. Witnesses early the previous evening had said that they’d seen him to be smoking; a cigarette had been found dropped from his lips on to his lapel and this directed investigators to examine the man’s clothes. They too, were expensive and freshly cleaned, but with all cleaner’s marks, manufacturer’s details and owner’s labels neatly removed. It was also noted that he had no hat, a circumstance which, in those days, was highly unusual. To all intents and purposes, the man had bathed, put on his clean clothes and, hatless, walked down to the sand, finding a nice position against the seawall where he lit up a cigarette and then quietly died.

No-one knew where he had been staying; it seemed that he had just dropped out of the sky.

The police issued a photograph through the local media and took a full body cast of the man to aid in identification. Thereafter, the autopsy continued apace. The results were largely inconclusive: the man had eaten a decent meal up to four hours before dying (although stress or other factors could have delayed or accelerated digestion, so this time period is merely an educated guess) consisting of a vegetable pastie. His stomach and duodenum were irritated and coated with mucus, a sure sign of poison, but no conclusive agent was determined. A tentative means of death by “heart failure” was listed, although this too is a prevarication.

The local rumour-mill began to turn and many people decided that Somerton Man must have been an American, due to the fact that his clothes were so expensive and “high toned”. No absentee Yanks were revealed in the manhunt, however. Regardless, his fingerprints were taken and sent both to the FBI and to Scotland Yard: both agencies denied knowledge of the victim.

Eventually, the Adelaide police issued a directive for any hotels, railways, or other types of accommodation to declare the presence of any unclaimed baggage items. This turned up a suitcase which had been left at the nearby railway station on November the 30^th, and which had not been recovered by its owner. The following items were discovered inside: a red-checked dressing-gown; red felt slippers, size 7; a shirt; a yellow coat shirt (that is, a shirt with an attached collar); a pair of light brown trousers with sand in the cuffs; four pairs of underwear; pyjamas; four pairs of socks; two ties; six handkerchiefs; a scarf; front and back collar studs; a shaving kit, with razor, strop and shaving brush; a toothbrush and toothpaste; a tin of brown Kiwi-brand shoe polish; a sewing repair kit; a button; a pair of scissors; a screwdriver; a cut down table knife; a stencilling brush; three pencils; sixpence in change; a cigarette lighter; eight large and one small envelopes; two airmail stickers; an eraser. The sewing repair kit in the suitcase contained an American brand of waxed thread which had been used to repair a small rip in Somerton Man’s coat pocket. Things seemed to be progressing.

Several items of clothing in the suitcase had identifying labels still on them with a name that could have been either “T. Kean”, or “T. Keane”. A bulletin was issued for anyone with knowledge of a person of this name to come forward. It turned out that a sailor named “T. Reade” was listed as missing, and excitement grew; it waned once more when T Reade’s workmates viewed the body and declared it to be not their man. Despite this setback, this series of events consolidated a belief amongst the investigating officers that Somerton Man was connected with the docks somehow: the stationery items in his case seemed to indicate that he habitually labelled items intended for shipping despatch. His apparent strength and good state of health helped underline this theory.

But, how does any of this apply to the Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam? An initial search of the man’s clothing found a scrunched-up pill of paper in his watch-fob pocket. When unrolled, it proved to be a quarto-sized leaf torn from a book, with the words “Tamam Shud” printed upon it. As anyone familiar with the Rubaiyat can tell you, these are the last words of the poem as translated by FitzGerald, meaning “it is done”. Police began searching libraries and book shops trying to find a copy of the book with its last page torn out. Again, they publicised the development and again – miraculously – they got a result.

On July the 22^nd in 1949, a fellow by the name of Ronald Francis came forward with the fact that he’d spotted a copy of the Rubaiyat in the glovebox of his (decidedly unpoetical) brother’s car. Following up this lead, the police found the book: according to Mr Francis’ brother, it had been tossed onto the back seat of his car through the open window after he’d left it parked on Moseley Street in Somerton, the road that ran along the stretch of beach above where the dead man had been found. Unable to account for its presence in his car, he’d thrown the book into the glovebox and forgotten about it.

Now things get interesting. On the rear pastedown of the book were two important pieces of information: a telephone number; and a series of letters in rows indicating that some working–out had taken place. Suddenly it appeared that the book in question was the key to some type of code. Things suddenly seemed sinister.

On the face of things, it seemed that Somerton Man and whoever he was known to, had some kind of book code operating. These codes require that both parties in the exchange have a copy of the same book; a three, or four-digit, sequence indicates the page, line, word and, if necessary, the letter required to decode the message. For example, if the paragraphs of this text were the code key to a secret message and the first word needed was “Somerton”, it would be encoded as “1.4.2” – first paragraph; fourth line; second word. Seemingly, the code in use was even more refined, signifying individual letters, and possibly with a cloaking algorithm to throw-off pursuit. However it worked, it remains undeciphered to this day.

These types of codes usually require that the book in question is one that is commonly found, usually a Bible or a dictionary of some kind. In this case, the book in question is not that common – at least, not any longer. It was the first printing of the poem by a New Zealand publishing company called Whitcombe & Tombs produced – according to Garrard (the latest Rubaiyat bibliography) in “194X”. Many publishing house were (and still are, but for different reasons lately) lacklustre in their efforts to date their offerings. All we can say about this version was that it was produced in the ‘40s sometime and reasonably before 1948. In later years, the company produced cheap versions in a paperback duodecimo format, possibly using variants of the page designs and artwork from the quarto original. I haven’t seen a copy of the larger version, but I do have a copy of the later small version:

FITZGERALD, Edward (trans.), Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyám (Courage and Friendship Booklet series), n.d. (c.1944), Whitcombe & Tombs Ltd., Christchurch, New Zealand.

Small folio; paperback, in illustrated gatefold yapp covers; 44pp.

Wrappers sunned; moderate edgewear; retailer’s stamp on the verso of the front free endpaper. Very good.

The discovery of the book and its possible use as a cipher key raised much discussion. Although newly released to the market, Whitcombe & Tombs’ quarto gift book would have been somewhat hard to track down and certainly more expensive than virtually any another easily-obtained work; given this, some people felt that the book-code possibility was too long a bow to draw. However, as we know, the question as to the rarity of the edition, and the ease by which two agents could find a copy to encode their missives, is somewhat of a moot point: as long as the two agents (if we can call them such) are using the same FitzGerald translation to encode and decode their messages, it doesn’t actually matter which published copy they used. And, as we know, the poem was positively ubiquitous in the public consciousness for the first half of last century.

(Some sources claim that the Whitcombe & Tombs edition found during the investigation was the first edition of FitzGerald’s translation and ponder endlessly as to 1) how Somerton Man could have obtained a copy of such a priceless work, and 2) why, subsequently, the Adelaide police would have carelessly disposed of such a valuable item after the case went cold. Of course, as we know, Bernard Quaritch published the first edition of FitzGerald’s first translation in 1859; the W&T New Zealand edition, was produced in the 1940s. I think we can safely remove this layer of bibliophilic frisson from the story.)

The unlisted telephone number, on the other hand, led police detectives to a nurse and single mother, moved to Adelaide from Sydney, named Teresa Powell, or Johnson. She lived at an address at Moseley Street in Glenelg, overlooking Somerton Beach, but claimed that she was not at home on November 30^th 1948. She did mention however, that her neighbour had seen an unidentified man approach her door and try the bell, only to leave when there was no response. After being shown the body cast of Somerton Man, Teresa appeared to go into a sudden faint; after being revived however, she claimed not to have recognised the deceased. Strange behaviour for someone shown a plaster cast of someone she didn’t know, and especially for a nurse who, arguably, should be accustomed to seeing the dead, even a facsimile of one.

Teresa, after being asked about her copy of the Rubaiyat, said that she had had a copy, but that she gave it to someone named Alfred Boxall whilst living in Sydney. Police discovered Alf Boxall working as a maintenance mechanic for a bus company in Randwick; they also found the copy of the Rubaiyat which Teresa had given him, signed “Teresa Jestyn”, her maiden name: it was a 1924 Sydney edition, not from Whitcombe & Tombs.

Teresa had relocated from Sydney to Melbourne after falling pregnant. After giving birth, she moved once more to Adelaide, where she went by the surname “Powell”. She told police that she was about to get married to a man named Prestige Johnson and feared that her connexion to the Somerton Man case might cause such scandal as to squelch the wedding event. Accordingly, the police agreed to minimise mention of her details in the Press and to refer to her only as “Miss Jestyn” where mention was unavoidable. In this manner, Teresa slipped cleanly away from involvement in the case: later investigators almost unanimously agreed that Teresa certainly knew the identity of the mysterious body; however, if this was true, she kept that secret right up until her death in 2007.

Meantime, Somerton Man was buried at the taxpayer’s expense in a nearby cemetery and his anonymous grave marker can still be found there today.

The case is still unresolved. Many theories abound as to who the mystery man was: some believe that he was an American spy, working the docks for Communist infiltrators or perhaps monitoring British atomic testing in South Australia. Other believe that he had links to organised crime and was working some kind of smuggling deal from the US. I have my own personal thoughts on the issue:

Firstly, it’s likely, given the array of stationery items which he had in his suitcase, that he did work on the docks in some kind of Customs and Excise capacity, requiring him to make stencils and to mark the boxes and crates, the despatch of which he supervised. It’s possible that he was promoted up the line from a lower position and came from a background where his education would have been rudimentary at best. I think that the letters in the back of the book, quite apart from being a code, were simply his efforts at visualising particular letters prior to having to cut them out of stiff card in order to make stencils. He used the book because, being precious to him, he carried it with him everywhere. I presume that his new job had taken him to the US a few times and thus, the American thread in his sewing kit.

Secondly, the Rubaiyat which he carried was a gift; I believe it was a gift to him from a woman for whom he had a passionate regard. I think he went to Somerton that hot day, wearing his best gear, to confront her, in some kind of a grand gesture: he arrived, stowed his bag in the railway station nearby, found a bathhouse in which to spruce up, and then went to her house, hoping against all odds that his lover would feel as much for him as he did for her, that she would welcome him in and the rest of their lives would start from there. I think that the woman in question was Teresa Jestyn/Powell, soon to be Johnson, and that she deliberately left him hanging, arranging to not be at home when he showed up.

Rejected, he tossed away the cherished book which she had given him - as she seemed to do with all her boyfriends, a fairly common practise back then – by throwing it through the back window of a nearby parked car. Then, feeling as low as he ever thought he could possibly feel, he treated himself to a poisoned meal and then saw out his last day with a cigarette and an ocean view. In his pocket, a form of suicide note: a piece of paper with the pregnant words “it is over” printed upon it.

That’s my reading of it and from my perspective as an unofficial Rubaiyat “expert”, it works well, even down to the flash nightwear that this guy was packing. And it opens interesting speculation as to who was the father of Teresa's child...

The true story may well never be revealed. In the meantime, it still surfaces occasionally to tantalise and to get conspiracy theorists cogitating. Kerry Greenwood, writer of the Phryne Fisher detective novels, published her account of the enigma in December 2012 (Tamam Shud: The Somerton Man Mystery), but she is by no means the only writer of mysteries to have seen its allure. Stephen King stumbled across the story and was inspired to write The Colorado Kid, a gumshoe novel which uses the strange details of the dead body’s discovery to open a can of two-fisted action; interestingly, the US’s SyFy channel used his book as the basis for its supernatural TV show “Haven” (awful, awful, awful) showing the long reach that a literary mystery can generate.

For me it’s a sad tale of someone, a fellow Rubaiyat lover, who took the poem at its word and followed his heart, like so many others have done before him and since. Sometimes though, seizing the day doesn’t always provide us with the outcomes we wanted so badly, and I believe that Somerton Man wanted his happy ending a little too much and was too much of a romantic to soldier on without. Omar also tells us, remember, that there’s nothing new under the sun and that these things too, shall pass; moderation and acceptance in all things, perhaps, is the answer.

Postscript:

As of late November 2022, genetic research has determined that the Somerton Man was a Victorian resident in absentia named Carl "Charlie" Webb. Forensic examination, using hairs removed from the plaster cast that was taken of the corpse, along with some sleuthing through genealogical databases, has arrived at this conclusion; however, a forensic police examination is also underway - following an exhumation of the body - and its findings have not yet been reached. The odds are pretty good, though, it has to be said.

Apparently, Charlie was a bit suicidal and had fled to South Australia leaving an abandoned and abused wife who divorced him a few months after his death. He was otherwise friendless and preoccupied with poetry - especially the darker, brooding kind - and so the Rubaiyat was obviously striking a chord within him. In the wake of all this, I've read an interesting essay showing that the 'code' in the back of his copy of the book might well have been a mnemonic device to remember favoured passages, but the presence of "Miss Jestyn's" 'phone number there as well is still an open question.

Bibliographically, amongst collectors and fans, the quest to determine which of the Whitcombe & Tombs' editions of the poem it was that Webb was using, continues. The majority of the editions that these publishers produced were undated and so their vintage can only be determined using gift inscriptions within the books, associated newspaper advertisements and records of lodgments within public institutions (libraries, etc.). There are some pretty determined detectives on the case though, and no doubt a consensus will soon be reached!